Greer Gilman's Blog, page 43

Full moon, Long Pond

Nine

View of the City of Florence, 1650

O my! O my! O my!



Liberty Puzzles have outdone themselves with a glorious View of Florence. This is only the central two panels of four: it's 1,534 pieces, and nearly four feet long.

Just look at the embedded whimsies! There are angels and Vespas, artisans and Medici.



Here's the Duomo, and Brunelleschi, and his mason's tools:



Here's Dante in a fine frenzy, glancing from hell to heaven, from the fires to the empyrean.



And here's Michelangelo at work on David.



Ecco bella Firenze! Favolosissimo!

Nine

P.S.  I invented a band in my sleep, and all I can remember is their name:  Rock Onsky and the Gungadillos.  They're probably still playing roller rinks.

9

Elfland mislaid

The grand library project has paused for a space, so that negothick and I can go to Pinewoods for a week of folking around.  But what a difference! With some crucial help from derspatchel , I can actually lay hands on most of my books.

In the library, I've pulled my mother's huge beloved pseudo-Jacobean desk away from the wall, so I can walk right round it, consulting shelves.  The room is that much smaller; but access is at least a third greater.  And then—I can't believe I never thought of this before—I realized there's a kneehole on the other side.  (Though the drawers, I think, are a blind.)  If I keep that great dark shining surface clear, I can work from both sides, laying out papers, or doing jigsaw puzzles.  Nice!

All of the hardback and trade paper fiction is alphabetized; all the various non-fictions are clumped by larger subjects.  I have about thirteen running feet of Shakespeare, and I haven't even unboxed the little Yales.  That all looked so pretty—my own micro Folger!—that I took all of the shelves out again, to make headroom for my First Folio fascmile, and brought it down from the living room.

In the course of all this, I found two very long-lost library books in improbable places.  I'd paid a fortune for those, and was refunded.  Yay!  All the library books are now In One Place.

What's still undone in the library:  I can't even get at the bookcase with the smaller paperbacks—all those Ballantines.  They want dusting and ordering.  The non-fiction needs sub-ordering of some sort, by author or LC.  Except that my own categories are cross-LC:  Shakespeare includes works on early modern theatre, dictionaries of the period, works on folklore and food and costume, Will-fiction.   Country life includes books on vernacular architecture and hedgerows; a 1641 farmer's account book; memoirs of shepherding; Dorothy Hartley.  Sun, moon, and stars embraces post-Galilean astronomy, celestial myths and legends, and astrology.  I have collections on Landscape; on Dialect; on Mazes; on Hoaxes.

And one bookcase full of oddities, and old beloved books that I want to take down and read a bit of and perhaps fall into, and shiny new acquistions, and just plain beautiful books.  It's a congeries.  It's a cocktail party, where they all stand around with glasses of Pierian Springs, and sip and sulk and chatter and prophesy.  I keep moving them into new conversations.

Most of my bedroom shelves are like that, but it's a lower-rent party.  No, not cakes and ale:  midnight cocoa.  They're insomnia books, the ones I reach for as the windows grey:  children's classics and Angela Brazil and Sayers and Wodehouse.  Stuff I've read a zillion times.  There's no order whatever, but at least I've dusted them and double-shelved.  The rest of the room is less-read children's books and hideobilia, and I can't get at them at all:  they're buried.

Still haven't dusted the great wall of myth and folklore in the living room.  I actually went out and got an inconspicuous chairside table to get being-read and about-to-be-read-any-month-now books off the floor and all the other chairs.  If you come to tea, you can sit!  You can navigate!

Last, there are three extra-special cases. One is for portfolios and boxed typescripts, with Andy Goldsworthy, and Tudor architecture, and albums of Punch cartoons.  That's where the facsimile First Folio lived all these years.  The second's where I keep archival Nine, and friends' books, and inscribed copies, along with my Lucy Boston and Diana Wynne Jones collections, and another little cocktail party:  for some reason, that's where my Tom Stoppard goes, and Guy Davenport's essays.  And the third—

So I got to the dark oak bookcase on the slant wall.  Byatt, Carter, Crowley, Warner:  all done and dusted.  What wasn't there—O my god—was my precious first edition of Lud-in-the-Mist. No noticeable gap, the dust undisturbed. Total panic.

I took myself firmly in hand, and tried to reconstruct the—not the crime—the mystery.

That's where it's always been:  that shelf. It's not a book I lend. It's not a thing that I'd lose on a bus, like an umbrella.  (It isn't, is it?)  I do have a bad habit of putting things away somewhere very safe and hidden--but surely a dedicated bookcase would be that safe place? My other bad habit is not putting things away at all.  And all along I kept being haunted by—not a memory—a feeling that I'd taken it to Readercon in 2009, that year I was GOH with Hope Mirrlees.  Which I kept dismissing as bizarre.  Why on earth would I do that?  How could I not miss a book like that for six years?

No, it had to be somewhere in the house—but looking for one book in here is like looking for one acorn in the wildwood.  I wrote everyone who'd ever been to tea. Did anyone remember my taking out the book to show them?  Not putting it back?  Any sightings or clues?

It was the_termagant and negothick —blessed among bibliophiles—who had the crucial clue.

They remembered that I did bring the Mirrlees to Readercon.  I what? No, really:  they saw me showing it to Michael Swanwick. I still don't remember doing that—I was on like 19 program items, and it's all a blur—but I reconstructed. Ex ungue leonem. After his tour-de-force GOH interview with a quietly elusive Hope (played, brilliantly, by Marianne Porter), Swanwick and Henry Wessells presented me with a beautiful handbound copy of his Hope-in-the-Mist. A gorgeous iridescent cerise.  Oh, of course!  It's the reading copy that's on the shelf.  I remembered seeing a flash of it, still in tissue, in a box—an aqua milk crate—of Readercon notes that I never got around to putting away afterward, because things got crazy.   I remembered that a stack of similar boxes got shifted out of the library a few years ago to make room for that Jacobean desk.  So I went down to the basement and excavated file boxes, which are not in orderly strata. And there was the aqua Readercon box, fourth back, third down, and there were both books, wrapped carefully together in tissue.

Loud squeals of joy.

Huzzah!

Though in my excitement, I was very nearly a martyr to literature. To get at the aqua box, I had to shift a 3-D jigsaw of very heavy boxes, out and in of a narrow space, and I nearly got brained by a typewriter.


"Too, too Gashlycrumb Tinies," said negothick .

Works for me:

M is for Myrtle, who was caught in a coil
N is for Niney, who was brained by a Roy'l...

Or I could go full Dylan Thomas, and write Under Underwood.

As thankful as I am to have my very dear book back, I am thankfuller not to be a memorial GOH. I'd love to hang out with Hope Mirrlees, but not yet.

Nine

Whole lotta Shakey

The Horrible Histories guys take on Shakespeare.

Thanks to Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous, the status of “definitive farce detailing William Shakespeare’s origin” seemed forever locked. That might change though, with the release of a more intentionally amusing biopic, entitled Bill, this September.



Nine

Airwormed

I am thankful for my air-conditioner, don't get me wrong—it's a godsend on days like this, especially when I'm moving bookshelves around.  But my new one sings.  Must be the frequency or something, but it plays ghostly melodies:  arrangements for alien woodwinds, lift-music for the Tardis.  Never more than the hook-phrase or the chorus, over and over again, until I hit pause.  It has a fairly wide selection of tunes.  Over the last week or two, it's given me:

Grieg's “Morgenstemning” (shades of Warner Brothers!)
"The Amphioxus Song" / "Tipperary"
“Wild Mountain Thyme”
“Among the Leaves So Green-O”
“The British Grenadiers”
“Blowin’ in the Wind”
Coke jingle:  “It’s the real thing...”
“Yankee Doodle”
“Rainy Days and Mondays”
“Gee, Ma, I Wanna Go Home”
“Ode to Joy”

Can anyone think what on earth these snatches have in common?

Nine

Department of Repugnancy

Some unpleasant person is trying Kickstart an unspeakably vile "anti-bullying" project for schools, using poor poor Edward {spit} de Vere as her emblem of ultimate victimhood.  Which is like using Bluebeard as the poster boy for domestic abuse.  "Shakespeare for bullies," indeed.  And she's got Sir Derek Jacobi pimping for her.

I hope this project catches fire and burns, before sinking into the Fifth Circle of Hell.

Is there any way of getting Kickstarter to reject this puppy?

Nine

The Tempest

This afternoon, about the fiercest squall I've ever seen blew in from the westward. There was a swift black front advancing like a war in heaven, and before I could shelter properly, it all went Hokusai. Great wave on wave of storm. Poignards of lightning, broadsides of rain: not coming down but sideways, and upwards from the pavement, knee deep. And hail! edged hail, that sounded on the awning I was huddled under like a hotel ice machine. Lethal stuff. I was only half-sheltered, with my arms full of dissolving bags of summer fruit, but I did risk my phone long enough to snap the hailstones, which were marvellous.





I hoped for a rainbow, but saw none.

Nine

What the spade encountered

Inter alia:

Viereck's Salome (I think it materialized.  I have no memory of buying it).*

Johannes Kepler on the Harmonies of the World.  He transcribed the music of the spheres.

David Ferry's translations of the Georgics and the Eclogues (widely separated, of course)

Evening's Empire : A History of Night in Early Modern Europe (Craig Koslofsky).

Lucifer's Legacy: The Meaning of Asymmetry. By a physicist, Frank Close.

My copy of Francis Spufford's Backroom Boys.

Caroline Spurgeon's Shakespeare's Imagery (been looking all over for that).

A lovely little pocket hardcover of Camden's Remains Concerning Britain (on which Grevil's Reliquiae is modelled).

Max Beerbohm's The Poets' Corner (a tiny book full of demurely wicked caricatures).

Gay, Bejeweled, Nazi Bikers of Gor, Verisillius of Er.  Slid between two other volumes.  Heh.

The Complete Enochian Dictionary: A Dictionary of the Angelic Language As Revealed to Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley.

P. G. Wodehouse's The Great Sermon Handicap, a translation of the story into scores of languages, ancient and modern. Inter alia: Romansch, Catalan, Middle English, Yiddish, Faroese, Old Norse, Esperanto, Papiamento, Finnish, Basque, Breton, Sanskrit, Maltese, Aramaic, Somali, Coptic, Czech... Alas!  No Sumerian.  No Akkadian.  Or indeed, any of whole classes of languages:  no East or South Asian, barely any African languages, no indigenous tongues.  Where’s Navaho?  Where’s Tibetan?  Plucked from the shipwreck of McIntyre & Moore.  Missing v. 1, which is why I could afford it.

Thor, with Angels: A Play.  Christopher Fry, 1948.  Scene:  A Jutish Farmstead, A.D. 596.  The characters include Merlin and a Messenger.

Maurice Dolbier's The Magic Bus, illustrated by Tibor Gergely.  Not my childhood Little Golden Book, but just as I remembered it.

A fine wooden teleidoscope, rolled under a bookcase.

And a missing Harvard library book (Theatrical training during the age of Shakespeare) that I finally paid the earth for two years ago, shoved under a stack of pitiable non-entities (stuff abandoned on sidewalks, guillotined discards, flyblown 19¢ paperbacks) in the dustiest, most buried shelf. Huh? I know I never put it there.  I’d've had to move furniture to put it there.  Not as strange as the missing cellphone that turned up under the blanket chest inside my best black shoe, but strange.

Nine

*Wait, wait.  It’s coming back to me.  From a very nice secondhand bookshop on the Cape, on that splendid trip with teenybuffalo and skogkatt to see Edward Gorey’s house.  Now there was a packrat.  They had to shovel out about 10,000 books just to dig walkways.  I felt right at home.

Shelf reliance

This isn't even late summer yet, is it?  I should have taken the rush of joy I got from Readercon, and converted it into novel, and instead I'm trying to re-arrange my library in a heat wave.  Not without excuse:  several cataclysms (making room for my late mother's furniture) had left it in earthquake-level chaos, and it's been silting up ever since.   Some shelves have been inaccessible for years behind boxes and tables, inches deep in dust.

despatchel , bless him, came over last week and got me through Fiction A-F, on the strength of Reed's Extra Ginger on the rocks.  We came out of that looking like coal miners.

After that, I bought a dustbuster.  (Amazon happened to have their very highest rated Black & Decker on sale for two-thirds off, free next-day shipping.  It was a sign.)   But still ... Alphabetizing spices (or books) is classic procrastination.

Other than having about 20% more books than I have shelves for (and I haven't even unpacked all the boxes of more books from my mother's house, if I ever will), I have a taxonomy problem.  The collection is multi-focal, and clumps by association:  old beloved books, shiny new books that I must read now if I could find them, watches-of-the-night books, winter books with buttered toast, dear friends' books, books any civilised person must own, books I blush to acknowledge.

Arrangement is complex.  Do I intershelve the mysteries with the other fiction?  (When I want a mystery, I want a mystery.)  The SF?  The children's books?  But what about writers who work in several genres?  Do I shelve Tiptree's biography or Alan Garner's essays or Sylvia Townsend Warner's letters with their fiction?  Do I keep all the Ballantines together?  And what on earth am I to do with the 18 running feet of biography which I turfed out to make room for Fiction G through part of M?  For now, leave it.  I've rediscovered Kenneth Clark's witty self-portrait with donors, Another Part of the Wood.

Tell me about your libraries.

Nine 

"Art is my spatula!"

Said the magnificent Leah Bobet on the by-now legendary Readercon panel, "Shifting the Realism Conversation."  Bobet, Michael Cisco, John Crowley, John Langan, and Yves Menard.  Some panels are dazzling, displays of jugglery with knives, books, fire, fruit, imagination.  This was more like intellectual Alpinism:  the driving of spikes into sheer rock, the judging of fingerholds, the sidelong scrabbling, the swinging out over fathomless abyss—but O my! the outlooks, the sunlight on snow.  Being all on the same mountain, the climbers worked off each other:  there was collaborative effort even in their arguments.   And they made it all the way from base camp to a set of ledges, with no one falling off, taking over, taking flight, or quarreling. It was—no, not spectacular. Enthralling.

That could have been me up there, dangling from a rope, abseiling over nothingness.   I'm glad it wasn't, as I have no head for heights.

"O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed...."

This is me on panels:




Fortunately all of my own panels were a joy to be on.

Thursday night was Books in Conversation. I remember saying that Tehanu was the irk in the oyster shell that accreted Cloud & Ashes. I reverence Le Guin—but I so very much wanted Tenar to unfold her own new heaven and new earth before her, even if she couldn't live in it.  I wanted her not to be eaten.  And (later I think) I spoke of how in 1611 the two magian comedies, The Alchemist and The Tempest, were played in repertory by the King's Men.   The same player would be the cogging Subtle one night and Prospero the next, the same boy would be Miranda and Dol Common.  Both playwrights were at the the top of their games and at odds:  the lion and the unicorn.  Years later, Ben was still grutching at that "Servant-monster" of Will's.  How he hated the fantastic! and yet was fascinated by it.  He quoted Martial as an epigram to his Sejanus:

Non hic Centauros, non Gorgonas, Harpyiasque
Invenies:  Hominem pagina nostra sapit.

Here you find no Centaurs, Gorgons, or Harpies:  my page tastes of mankind.

Afterward, jinian drove me and rushthatspeaks safely home in the rain and dark, which was a blessing.

More to come.

Nine

P.S.  Up already!  Here's Where the Goblins Go.  And here's I Put Books in Your Books So You Can Read While You Read.  For heaven's sake turn the picture off, if I'm in it, and just listen.  The videos seem to be going up at a good rate, so I hope to have Sonya Taaffe's marvellous reading, and Lila Garrot's, and Elizabeth Hand's, and (with trepidation) my own—with all that wonderful stuff I couldn't get to!